SEP public meetings in Australia:

Why and How the GPU Murdered Leon Trotsky

18 November 2015

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Australia is holding public meetings, “Why and How the GPU Murdered Leon Trotsky,” in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne during December.

The meetings are part of the commemoration by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) of the 75th anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination. Speakers will include James Cogan, SEP national secretary, and Nick Beams, of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site.

On August 20, 1940, Trotsky was assassinated by an agent of the Soviet secret police, the GPU, in Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City, where he was living in exile.

The assassination of Leon Trotsky ranks among the most politically consequential crimes of the twentieth century, with far-reaching implications for the international working class and the world socialist movement. And yet for decades the circumstances surrounding Trotsky’s assassination remained shrouded in secrecy. The massive scale of the Stalinist conspiracy against Trotsky was the subject of a carefully orchestrated cover-up.

In 1975, the ICFI launched the first systematic investigation by the Trotskyist movement into the assassination. This investigation, known as Security and the Fourth International, led to the exposure of the network of GPU agents within the Fourth International that ensured the success of Stalin’s conspiracy against Trotsky’s life. The investigation was bitterly opposed by Pabloite and pseudo-left organisations, which denounced the exposure of spies placed inside the Trotskyist movement as “agent-baiting.” This has remained their position, despite the fact that state intelligence documents released following the dissolution of the Soviet Union confirmed the findings of the International Committee and vindicated Security and the Fourth International.

The speakers at the meetings will address the significance of Trotsky’s life and political struggle, the origins and development of the International Committee’s investigation into his assassination, and its key findings.